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The Literary Influences of Superstar Musician David Bowie

BY JOHN O'CONNELL ON 10/31/19 AT 5:00 AM EDT

David Bowie was a pop star for most of his career from the 1960s until his death in 2016. He was known for his flamboyant style, songwriting and the ability to artistically turn on a dime. But Bowie, who died of cancer at 69, was more than a multi-platinum rock and roller. He was also one of the more literate composers in the business.

So much so, in fact, that in conjunction with a career retrospective in 2013 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Bowie issued a list of the one hundred books he considered the most important and influential. British music columnist John O'Connell linked this list to Bowie's prolific music. The result? A book called Bowie's Bookshelf out this month from Gallery Books.

William S. Burroughs first made the link between Bowie's lyrics and T. S. Eliot's poetry. In a Rolling Stone interview, Burroughs asked if Hunky Dory's "Eight Line Poem" had been influenced by Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Bowie's reply: "Never read him." But Bowie was definitely exposed to Eliot's influence. "Goodnight Ladies" on Transformer, the album Bowie produced for Lou Reed in 1972, is a riff on the end of the second section, "A Game of Chess," from Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Eliot, for his part, is deliberately quoting Ophelia's "Good night, sweet ladies" speech from Hamlet. Eliot's method established a new protocol for artistic theft—the modern poet in dialogue with his or her predecessors. Bowie, too, was candid about how much he took from other artists. "You can't steal from a thief," he said when LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy admitted to stealing from Bowie's songs.

Avaiable in : https://www.newsweek.com/2019/11/15, accessed on February 20th, 2020. Adapted. 

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow.

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Should schools just say no to pupils using phones?

14th July 2024

Natalie Grice – BBC News

“I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a child never to have a smartphone. I think it’s part of a balanced life. You’ve got to live in your own time.”

These are not the words you might expect to hear from a teacher at a school that has never in its history allowed pupils under sixth form age to use a mobile phone on the premises.

But Sarah Owen, deputy head at Stanwell School in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, was simply expressing a personal opinion, rather than the school’s view about a young person’s wider life.

It is clear that she and the school have very firm opinions on what is best for children while they are on school grounds.

For Stanwell pupils in years 7 to 11, that has always meant no phones. Not in lessons, not in the corridor, not at breaktimes.

It is such a long-established rule that it presumably comes as no surprise to pupils and parents when they join the school, which is starting to seem as if it may have been ahead of a growing curve.

In the past few years, a number of schools across Wales and further afield have introduced total bans on mobiles. While Stanwell only asks pupils to keep phones switched off in their bags, others require the devices to be handed in at the start of the day.

Llanidloes High School in Powys is one which has implemented this policy in the past few years and Ysgol Penrhyn Dewi in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, followed suit at the start of this year.

Sarah Owen has been at Stanwell School since 2000 and says that there has always been a no phone policy in the school. For Sarah, it is a question not of trying to impinge on their students’ freedom, but of giving them vital time away from mobile life, for welfare as well as educational reasons.

“We genuinely believe this is in their best interests,” she said. “Phone addiction and screen addiction and scrolling, the loss of concentration, the loss of soft skills around listening and interacting with others, that’s something we need to be concerned about as a society generally.”

“We want children to be interacting with each other, having conversations, playing football, having those connections and interactions with other people.”

Sarah also believes it gives pupils relief from the possibility of being “photographed, filmed, mocked in some way – that’s not a nice way for children to live”. She said she wanted her pupils to have “some sanctuary from the anxiety of feeling so scrutinised and looked at”. 

Adapted from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles